Web Stress, Slow Websites & Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC]
Is your slow website giving your customers “web stress”? Studies show 57% of online consumers will abandon a slow page after just 3 seconds.
March 14, 2013
Is your slow website giving your customers “web stress”? Studies show 57% of online consumers will abandon a slow page after just 3 seconds.
If your business relies upon e-commerce or online marketing channels to attract customers, it is important that you consider the impact poor website performance can have on your business. At a recent Velocity Conference, Eric Schurman (Microsoft) and Jake Brutlag (Google) presented; “Users who experience a 2-second site slowdown make almost 2% fewer queries, click 3.75% less often, and report being significantly less satisfied with their overall experience.”
With both revenue and customer satisfaction on the line, monitoring the performance, availability and effectiveness of your website is critical. Manually-based website monitoring is not an option. It’s costly, time-intensive, and inconsistent.
Dotcom-Monitor uses a non-cache DNS monitoring solution with high frequency monitoring that propagates DNS queries to the root name servers. That means a DNS issue will be identified quickly, as opposed to being masked for days as it might be with a cached monitoring approach. When monitored properly, using a non-cache method, an error is quickly identified so the designated workaround, like a DNS failover, can be implemented.
Dotcom-Monitor non-cached DNS monitoring (unlike some other cache-based DNS monitoring solutions) also provides diagnostics with an automated trace-route as soon as a DNS problem is detected. This means less time investigating the problem and much faster mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). The Dotcom-Monitor DNS monitoring solution also allows website owners to spot trends so that small DNS issues can be addressed before they become big DNS problems.
The only way to know how well or how reliably DNS servers perform is to make consistent, regular objective tests and measurements over time. While DNS servers can be verified manually, that is not a practical solution. Manually checking the DNS servers a few times a week, or even a few times a day, simply does not provide enough data to accurately judge performance, nor does it quickly alert website owners to problems. Automatic DNS monitoring gives website owners the information needed.
Earlier this week Dotcom-Monitor announced ServerView Monitoring™ Media Stream. This technology allows users to monitor a broad range of streaming content from an external “user experience” perspective. In addition to comprehensive data and diagnostic aspects, customizable alerts may be setup for each media stream to continually monitor media performance and availability. Interactive waterfall charts and drill downs amongst the data allow users to locate and repair problems, significantly reducing mean time to repair (MTTR).
Below is a list of streaming media formats currently available for monitoring and testing:
On February 5, 2013, Dotcom-Monitor announced ServerView Monitoring™ Media Stream. This media stream monitoring technology continually tests internet streams in Chrome, Flash, and Windows Media stream formats. This new Streaming Media Monitoring Tool has the capability to monitor hundreds of online stream formats and codecs from an external “user experience” perspective. Customized instant alerts may be setup for each streaming media monitoring instance to check performance and availability 24×7.
Below is a list of streaming media codecs currently available for monitoring and testing:
Dotcom-Monitor is currently monitoring the 12 Minnesota online retailers that ranked in the Internet Retailer 500 list in 2011. The website monitoring platform is currently aggregating information on Minnesota online retailers webpage speed, uptime / downtime, and details on the page element performance. Website homepages are being tested via an Internet Explorer browser running full page renders every 15 minutes from nine North American locations. These tests will not only provide a baseline for Minnesota’s top online retailers, but will also provide Dotcom-Monitor the data and analytics to pinpoint issues that occur on these Minnesota online company websites in relation to Black Friday, the Holiday Season and the increased traffic and server stress that will ensue.
Black Thursday Eve, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, are here and web sales are expected to increase up to 18% this holiday shopping season compared to 2011, according to ComScore. Last year’s online retail holiday sales were $37.2 billion. Unfortunately, some website owners will discover that their website’s speed and performance does not meet customer expectations and they’ll miss out on their piece of the web sale pie.
So, with pressure on e-commerce websites to perform, web operation personnel are tasked to make websites look great and handle the stress points of added holiday traffic. Moreover, 2011-2012 has seen an explosion in the use third-party apps such as widgets, social media buttons, and third party icons that impact website speed and performance.
Cloud-based applications with poor performance cost companies lost revenues and customers. In fact, as cloud apps become more complex more performance issues can occur, resulting in lost conversions and higher rates of website abandonment. Therefore, companies running cloud web applications need to continually monitor for performance issues, functionality and availability.
Traditional web applications sit on static servers inside a data center behind company firewalls. This delivery chain is fixed with minimal variables. Cloud applications, however, are more complex by nature. Here the application delivery chain moves from an end-user through a browser (PC or mobile device), across the Internet (through a local ISP, or mobile carrier), through a third-party (cloud provider, or content delivery network (CDN)), into the complex infrastructure of a data center. All of these elements are essential to a cloud-based application’s performance making cloud testing and cloud monitoring much more challenging than traditional application performance management.
Dotcom-Monitor recently chose 20 midsized online companies to monitor for one week from those ranked 500-600 in the Internet Retailer 2011 ranking. We focused our monitoring on a demographic that encompasses what is considered a mid-size company, not large enough to have inexhaustible budgets, and just large enough to begin considering ways to optimize web site performance. By testing their websites at a 15-minute frequency from nine North American monitoring locations for seven days using a non-caching, Internet Explorer browser we were able to pinpoint potential areas to improve and issues to avoid.
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